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Hi, i was need some short and simple script to list all tables and columns of MSSQL database. There was nothing easy to explain on the net, so i've decided to share my short script, i hope it will help.

I got a serious problem with Unicode data when working with PHP and MSSQL. I have to say the PHP and MSSQL doesn't seem to be a good combination.

MSSQL is really complicated to work with since the whole server uses a single character encoding[ucs-2]. In order to store unicode information, the column data types must be specified as one of the national character types, NVARCHAR, NCHAR or NTEXT.

In order to retrieve data saved in unicode format, M$ suggest users to cast columns to binary data.Unfortunately php_mssql extension doesn't support binary data to be returned in string columns.

My advice is to use FreeTDS driver [it's just an php extension]. This driver seems to handle unicode data better. I can put and receive unicode with casting or change encoding.

After extensive research trying to get PHP on Linux communicating with SQL Server 2005 and 2008 including support for all Unicode, MAX and XML data types I could not find any open source solutions...yes, I spent a lot of time trying to get FreeTDS to work to no avail.

I found one free solution that runs on Windows which is to use the "SQL Server Driver for PHP" provided by Microsoft (http://sql2k5php.codeplex.com). The driver relies on the Microsoft Native Client ODBC drivers for SQL Server 2008 (part of the "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client" which is downloadable from Microsoft) which is why this solution will not work on anything except Windows.

I did find a solution that works for PHP on Linux but it's not free...use the standard PHP::ODBC lib (free) and the Easysoft ODBC driver for SQL Server (not free, but reasonable by Enterprise standards). You can check out the ODBC driver by going here http://www.easysoft.com/products/data_access and looking for "Easysoft ODBC-SQL Server Driver"

Using the new MS driver I have come across a difference between the array that I get back compared to mssql.

Example is here (both return types are associative arrays:

sqlsrv_fetch_array($resource, SQLSRV_FETCH_ASSOC)
"same as" sqlsrv_fetch($resource), as this returns by default an associative array, by default sqlsrv_fetch_array returns both an associative and a numeric array.